A governess arrives at a mansion to instruct the children. The daughter is not too interested: the diaries claim that she ruins them for marriage. It's the Victorian era, the lower classes live in a Dickensian environment, women who question the rules are considered hysterical, and phrenology, the art of determining a person's character based on the shape of their head, is in vogue. It's a world that the governess Winifred Notty, with a tumultuous past, will seek revenge against in a grandiose manner. Virginia Feito (Madrid, 1988) returns to the novel after the success of Mrs. March with Victorian Psycho (Lumen/La Campana), whose bloody and ironic protagonist shows that psychopathy and gore are also women's business. The novel was originally written in English, a language in which Feito feels more comfortable due to her training abroad, and it will be turned into a film starring Margaret Qualley (The Substance).
Change of era
“Now psychopaths are sexy. They are in fashion, explore them, romanticize them a little”
The title of your novel refers to American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Are the killers comparable?
It was a distant nod that I should have thought more about, a very obvious statement of intent. It amused me because Patrick Bateman is my favorite literary psychopath, but they don't have that much in common. Except for a great anger. My real favorite psychopath is Robert Durst, from the series The Jinx.
Are psychopaths trendy nowadays?
Yes, and it's trendy to explore and romanticize them a bit. I think of Dexter, You. In the Victorian era, the term didn't exist, villains were villains, and their motives and origins of evil were not explored. In Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, Count Fosco, one of my favorite villains, is clearly a psychopath for doing what he does, but it wasn't the same. Now, psychopaths are seen as sexy. They're in fashion.
Why?
For a long time it was too morbid and it was not right to dwell on these things, and now we are allowed to enter that territory a bit and assess it. The bad boy has always been in fashion. And our desensitization is growing, little can impact us and it is getting worse. We started with Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre who had the madwoman in the attic and now we are with people who shoot parents in the face. My mother would say that we are insensitive to so much violence.
As its protagonist...
She has had a rough time, has seen many things. She neither feels nor suffers. And she's having a great time. She is a psychopathic villain, but with a great sense of humor, although she also uses it to manipulate you. She has social perspective, is very observant, knows how ridiculous her society can be. I really like her, I can't help it. She is a relatively classic villain, and I wonder if she was made or born that way.
What do you think?
I propose arguments in favor of both. I don't know to what extent each reader will justify what they do, knowing the abuse they have suffered. Many say that the people they kill often deserve it. But not the baby, or the poor servant. She's lovely until you bother her. Then, she gets rid of you. And she enjoys it. But if you are born in an environment where no one loves you, you don't form any kind of relationship with anyone, your own mother abandons you, your father says you are expendable, and all the time they are telling you that you are bad, I don't know if there comes a point where you believe it. Or if people instinctively sense that there is something dangerous about you, something is wrong with you.
“Lately I see a tendency to praise female revenge”
A Dickensian Childhood...
Yes. Dickens was also very dark, he didn't hide the darkness and child abuse, violence, and prostitution. Then hope and kindness triumphed, perhaps. And here he would be scandalized. But reading real cases from the time, there was a female serial killer who was killing babies left in the care of single women who couldn't handle them: Amelia Dyer, my favorite female psychopath. She killed 400 or 500 that were found buried underground. It was a time of abuse, cruelty, so many babies were dying that they were thrown into the river. There were children stuck in chimneys and they would light fires to see if that would help... Reading things from the Victorian era, in the end, I would laugh, it was a parody of itself. I started to grow an aggressive laughter as I wrote. And all the ridiculous sexism. Any reason was enough to send a woman to the psychiatric hospital, Dickens himself tried it because he wanted to divorce. The novel is a critical parodic satire of the era.
For Notty, we all carry a demon inside, do you believe it?
I believe that all human beings have darkness within them to a greater or lesser extent. If all the bad things we have done were exposed, one after another, we would surely seem like villains too.
Does your novel show that bloodthirsty psychopaths are no longer just a male thing?
It may be. Lately, I see a tendency to praise female revenge, understandable considering all they have done to us, poor things, we can finally grab a machete and kill them because we are fed up. I don't know how much they will defend Notty for being a woman, but I can understand a certain satisfaction in her fighting against patriarchy, especially the Victorian one. But the other things she does... are not right.
